a japanese case for gun control

In Tokyo a guy called Tomohiro Kato killed seven people in the middle of the day on a busy shopping street in the Akihabara neighborhood. He told the police after being stopped (alive, by a cop who dueled with him with his night stick before pulling a gun and threatening to shoot), "I am tired of life. I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn't matter who they were. I came alone." (Kato will probably lose the life he has grown tired of - Japan has the death penalty.)

Kato's weapons of choice: a rental truck he drove into a crowd, and then a large knife.

Kato did pretty well, in the sick score-keeping of mass murder, killing seven. Just think how much more efficient he could have been if he had a gun. Guns are relatively rare in Japan, thanks in part to strict gun control laws. If Kato had lived in say Richmond, Virginia, he could have gotten a couple of sweet semi-automatics and done real damage.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people." True. And this is also true: "People kill people, and people with guns kill more people more easily."

a shooting at (fill in the blank), (x) people killed, (y) injured

The Northern Illinois shooting is sad; I feel very bad for the victims and their families and friends.

What will come out of it? Probably nothing beyond a half-dozen funerals and some heart-wrenching scenes at memorial services. We are clearly not at a place in this country where politicians are prepared to take a risk to thwart the will of the NRA and actually pass meaningful gun control laws, despite growing public support for such laws.

No, not laws that tell you that you may not own a gun, period. But at least laws that strengthen the controls around them, that strictly limit ownership of semi-automatic weapons and the like (which are not used for hunting anything but human beings), that require real checks on the would-be owner.

But clearly protection of the fetish of gun ownership as espoused by the NRA and its lackeys in Congress is more important than protection of our lives.

Do I even bother to note that the Constitution's Second Amendment reads,

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

In other words, this amendment is supposed to protect the STATES from being disarmed by the Federal government in order to maintain its militia. Not the right for every crackpot and misanthrope to pack heat.

virginia tech and a modest proposal

When I first heard about the killings at Virginia Tech, I banged out a quick, sarcastic response to what I knew would be the defense of the gun-rights fundamentalists -- that limiting access to handguns wouldn't have prevented this killing. It is true that the killer could have gotten weapons and gone on this rampage even if buying handguns were difficult in Virginia or elsewhere in the USA. But you know, the United States is not dramatically a more violent place than countries like Britain or Canada. Just that we have easy access to guns and many more handguns are floating around, so a brief flare-up of violence that might end up with somebody being knifed or beaten up in Birmingham, England can end up with one or more people actually dead in Birmingham, Alabama (not picking on Alabama here -- could also compare Versailles, Ohio to Versailles, France).

Anyway, here is the sarcastic response. Do I need to tell you that you should have your irony cap on?

Another shooting tragedy, this time at Virginia Tech University in small town Virginia. The fact that this guy was able to murder 32 people before killing himself is proof that our gun laws are badly outmoded. The important question of whether or not to possess a gun should not be left to individual citizens, without regard to the welfare of society at large. No -- gun ownership should be MANDATORY. And not only should ownership be mandatory, every person aged 14 and over should be required to actually CARRY a loaded firearm at all times.

I mean, think about it. If every one of those students -- and the professors, administrators, gardeners, janitors, tutors, and HVAC technicians -- had been armed, that murderous SOB might have been deterred from committing this outrage in the first place. And if he HAD decided to do the shooting (after all, he killed himself so I presume he was prepared to die) anyway, surely he wouldn't have shot more than 5 or 10 people tops before somebody blew his brains out. We'd just have to trust that the student self-defense shooters would practice appropriate caution with their firearms and wouldn't accidentally riddle each other with lead in a murderous crossfire.

Now naturally, there might be a few more instances of people shooting each other every time they get in an argument or something if everybody 14 and older (but we could grant birkenstock-wearing liberal peaceniks, Buddhists and girly-man cowards religious exemptions) has to carry a gun. But that is the price of liberty and autonomy. After all, we shouldn't expect our government to protect us from every little risk like being shot dead in your car for maybe cutting off some other driver or idly checking out some guy's girfriend, or from being fired from Circuit City for making too much money, or from living on a planet subject to increased floods disease, and famine due to human-caused global warming, now should we? Because that would be Godless Communism.